The subject matter of this disclosure relates to controlling access to printed documents, and to printing desired print jobs as a batch at a predetermined time.
Within an office or print shop environment, a single user may want to print multiple documents. With an active printer, however, other jobs may enter a print queue in-between multiple print jobs that the user has submitted over a period of time. There may also be times when the user may want to be present during printing to retrieve the printed documents. For example, if the content of one or more print jobs is confidential, a user may wish to obtain the printed documents immediately upon completion of the print job or jobs.
In a network environment, a print job generated at one location on the network can be printed at another location. On occasion, it may be necessary or desirable to print a document containing confidential or otherwise sensitive information. Because such information may be sent to a networked or group printer, the sender may want to protect the transmission from electronic interception, or at least prevent unauthorized viewing of the hard copy printout. A known method to prevent such a transmission from being electronically intercepted is the use of encryption protocols such as SSL (Secured Socket Layers) or TLS (Transport Layer Security). Such encryption protocols will not prevent unauthorized viewing of a hard copy printout or viewing of print jobs stored in a print queue.
For example, if a print job sent to a printer contains privileged or confidential information, and the sender cannot be present to retrieve the hard copy printout, the hard copy printout is then viewable to any person at the printer. Furthermore, upon entering the print queue, the print job having privileged or confidential information is likely to be inserted among other print jobs in the print queue. Accordingly, the sender of the print job would then have to wait at the printer for any print job inserted in the queue prior to the desired print job before being able to retrieve the sender's print job. This problem becomes exacerbated if the sender has multiple print jobs in the print queue.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,932 discloses a sender node that encrypts a print job and a printer node that decrypts the print job prior to printing. In the event the print job contains confidential information, the sending node generates an encrypted portion using a public key of the printing node. The printing node contains a private key and upon receiving the encrypted print job, decrypts the portion to ascertain whether the print job requires authentication by the intended recipient before printing. In the event such identification is needed, the print job is stored in the encrypted form until the print node receives the proper authentication from the intended recipient.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,583 also discloses the encryption of print data by print node and storing the encrypted data without printing until the print node receives proper authentication from the intended recipient. U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,583 discloses that the print job is not required to be encrypted at the sending node before being sent to the print node but in order to provide secured data transmission over a network, a secured data transmission protocol, such as SSL or TLS can be used to provide a more efficient transmission from the sending node to the print node. Smart-cards or smart-card chips are preferably utilized to supply the authentication to the print node. The smart-cards are preferably ready by a smart-card reader located at the image forming device and connected to the print node so that the print node can confirm that the intended recipient is present at the image forming device when the image is printed.
A smart-card interface is attached to a desktop computer for interfacing with a smart-card of a computer user. The smart-card provides a mechanism whereby a computer user can authenticate the user's identity to the desktop computer. The smart-card contains a private key of a private/public key pair which is specific to a computer user and which is used to secure the printing of image data. A printer, connected to a network, may include an embedded smart-chip which contains a private key of the private/public key pair corresponding to the printer for use in encryption and/or decryption of data received by the printer. The printer may also be connected to a smart-card interface device, which is capable of interfacing with a smart-card of a print job recipient. In this manner, the printing of a print job for a particular intended recipient may be controlled through the use of a smart-card interface and smart-card in combination with the smart-chip in printer.